Date: Mon, 10 Mar 1997 23:50:25 EST
From: Larry Horn
Subject: recently attested items
1) on register, context, and l-lessness: On the ABC World News Tonight
Friday, Vice President Gore--a Tennessean, of course--was doing one of those
tours-to-see-how-devastating-the-devastation-was along the flooded Ohio
between Kentucky and Ohio. He promised that "we"--the Federal
government--"will hep you". I was struck by the l-->0/__p as used by Al Gore;
somehow it seems unlikely that he would have been ready to offer to "hep" the
Bosnians restore peace to their land, or to "hep" schoolchildren gain better
access to the information highway. I think it's also relevant that he was
wearing jeans and a sport shirt for the flood tour, while the "hep"-less
contexts would be ones in which he'd be wearing a suit and tie.
2) on mock- or faux-Spanish (no problemo, etc.): another formation I've
come across recently is the superlative-forming -mondo, e.g. the use of
both "correctamundo" and "perfectamundo" in a currently-airing radio
commercial for RCA. I tried tracking them down via Nexis, and traced the
former back to 1989, where the first (of 19) citations included a reference to
the popularizing of the term by the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Evidently,
though, "correctamundo" has outlived Raffy, Leo, Mike and Don.
"Perfectamundo", on the other hand, had just two cites, the earlier in 1992.
Did this suffix derive from a perverse blend of -mente and mundo? Best not to
know, perhaps.
3) some evidence that positive "anymore" is indeed spreading outside of its
original area, even among non-linguists: The speaker is a sportscaster on
local New York all-sports radio WFAN, Joe Benigno. Joe is, like me, a native
Noo Yawka, and wears it proudly, r-lessness and all. He's actually a guy who
used to call in so regularly that he was given his own show to host, albeit
one that starts at 1:00 a.m. or so. So anyway here he is complaining about
how inconsistently the home town basketball team, the New York Knicks, have
been playing, just following the post-game show after "another agita special".
What he says is "The Knicks are a different team from quarter to quarter
anymore". Only, given the regional loyalty, they're "a different team from
kwawta tuh kwawta anymaw". (Sorry for the transcription; ascii doth make
dialect novelists of us all.) Somehow the combination of the indigenous
vocalic clusters and the very much non-indigenous use of "anymore" struck me as
particularly incongruous.
Any thoughts?
--Larry